In hrbrmstr/varmint: Retrieve Content from and Interact with 'Gopher' Servers

varmint

Retrieve Content from and Interact with 'Gopher' Servers

Description

The 'Gopher' protocol is a 'TCP/IP' application layer protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the Internet. The 'Gopher' protocol was strongly oriented towards a menu-document design and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately 'Hypertext Transfer Protocol' ('HTTP') became the dominant protocol. The 'Gopher' ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the 'World Wide Web'. Tools are provided to interact with and retrieve content from 'Gopher' servers.

What's Inside The Tin

The following functions are implemented:

• gopher: Fetch a resource using the gopher protocol
• g_content: Retrieve the content portion of a gopher response

TODO

• better handling of the url parameter to gopher()
• handle URL selectors
• handle content types
• console gopher client
• Shiny gopher client

Installation

devtools::install_github("hrbrmstr/varmint")

options(width=120)

Usage

library(varmint)
library(tidyverse)

# current verison
packageVersion("varmint")

Take a peek at one of the only remaining Gopher servers in existence:

x <- gopher("gopher.floodgap.com") 

str(x)

x

g_content(x, TRUE) %>% 
  print(n = 20)

See some other servers

x1 <- gopher("gopher://gopher.floodgap.com", "/new") 

x1

g_content(x1, TRUE) %>% 
  print(n = 20)

Check out the Veronica menu

x2 <- gopher("gopher://gopher.floodgap.com", "/v2") 

x2

g_content(x2, TRUE) %>% 
  print(n = 20)

Search for some XKCD comics

x3 <- gopher("gopher://gopher.floodgap.com", "/v2/vs", "xkcd")

x3

g_content(x3, TRUE) %>% 
  filter(item_type_descr == "info")

g_content(x3, TRUE) %>% 
  filter(item_type_descr == "menu")

hrbrmstr/varmint documentation built on May 7, 2019, 9:36 a.m.